The People At Number 9 - Felicity Everett

★★✰✰✰

Genre: FictionSynopsis: When
Gav and Lou move into the house next door, Sara spends days plucking up
courage to say hello. The neighbours are glamorous, chaotic and just a
little eccentric. They make the rest of Sara's street seem dull by
comparison. When the hand of friendship is extended, Sara is
delighted and flattered. Incredibly, Gav and Lou seem to see something
in Sara and Neil that they admire too. In no time at all, the two
couples are soulmates, sharing suppers, bottles of red wine and
childcare, laughing and trading stories and secrets late into the night
in one another's houses. And the more time Sara spends with Gav
and Lou, the more she longs to make changes in her own life. But those
changes will come at a price. Soon Gav and Lou will be asking things
they've no right to ask of their neighbours, with shattering
consequences for all of them...

***

Review: I thought this was going to be a thriller when I bought it. I mean, it looks like a generic one, the title sounds like a generic one - but admittedly I now cannot find the word 'thriller' anywhere in association with this novel. My bad. It didn't even have to be a thriller though, one dead body from 20 years ago or something would have been fine.

That said, I tend to enjoy a bit of all kinds of books, so when I say this one was really wasn't great, it's not just because I was expecting a thriller - it's just dull as dishwater. This is essentially a character driven novel, which tells the story of how one couple is dazzled and drawn into the crazy lifes of a super charismatic couple. But the problem is, not one single character in the book is even interesting, let alone charismatic. Gav and Lou are a bit weird, but that's all they are, and when Sara and Neil start acting out of (what little) character (they have), I was honestly just left sitting there thinking, 'heh? Really? How can you be falling for that?'

Additionally, the novel skips along in fragments, reviewing events which occurred in the interim, presumably to indicate the passage of time and draw the story out over a sufficient period of time, but it mostly felt like the author didn't know how to pad out those gaps. I couldn't wait to get to the end of this one, a very disappointing purchase.